Slowly But Surely, But Also Very Slowly

Thank the Gods, tonight I was able to fit back into my "skinny jeans". Stop laughing now, at least to ME, they're skinny jeans. Eight weeks and 15 pounds later, I'm zipping them up! Right now I am just three pounds from what I weighed when I was married, and three pounds from my pre-pregnancy weight. In six pounds from here, I'll weigh what I did last time around on Weight Watchers a couple years ago, after a bout with quite a stomach churning flu.

It feels good. And when I say this, I'm not talking about the fit of the clothes or even some kind of difference in my energy or the way my body feels, I'm talking about my self esteem and confidence. I still have a long way to go in that department, but even feeling 5% less self conscious is (no pun intended), such a weight off my shoulders.

I've been made fun of my whole life. Grew up in an upper-middle class bubble, where the girls were all perfect carbon copies...beautifully blond, anorexic and tan. They effortlessly sported their J. Crews over tropical island, spring break tans. I was a little brown haired girl, who wore plaid framed eyeglasses and culottes with knee socks. I stayed short and never grew the obligatory long legs, I was chubby and artsy and scoffed at many conventions. Too brown, too short, too fat, four eyed and not tan enough. I always felt so ugly and just plain crumby inside.
One year we went to Aspen for winter break. The high mountain, ski goggle tan, just didn't cut it when I got home. I had an awesome backpack, an Invicta that my Dad brought back from Italy. Boy did I love that backpack. It was neon green, with an equally intense, but creative pattern. They picked the hell out of me.

So, I guess you could say, that I lack a bit in the self confidence department. I've carried these thoughts of being the ugly duckling all along the way. It gets easier with time though, and I have every reason to think that I'm on the right track.

Hello, tangent!

So yeah, here I am eight weeks out, with plans of trudging on. I'm not going to stop. My goal is twenty five pounds down the road, heading for my high school fighting weight. Honestly not light by anyone's standards, but I've always been a bit of a strong, musclely stump. At only five feet tall, I won the girl's bench press competition in our high school PE class, I beat the pants off many boys during sparing matches in my Teakwondo class in college. This is what having a brother and a dirt bike will do to you.

It's hard though, at least for me, oh is it hard. I kind of miss eating. I mean, of course you get to eat on Weight Watchers, but it's a lot less. Everything is portion controlled, you count each bite and take in a lot less calories. I won't lie, while it's a fairly easy to follow plan, I'm often hungry and a little zapped of energy. It's kind of a bummer. I miss pasta and other treats and eating out where I want, and drinking more than water and joining in at parties and BBQ's.

A neat thing though, is all the little tricks I've devised, to make this diet easier, and some of them are kind of fun. For example, what would I do this summer without our ever fruiting grape and cherry tomato plants. Zero points! I eat two big handfuls nearly every lunch and dinner, fresh off the vine. They help to fill me up and my God, can you just imagine my lycopene levels!? Or at night, when I'm hungry but don't want to snack, I just brush my teeth! Because everyone knows, I'm too lazy to get up again to brush them a second time if I had caved into eating a late night snack. Or tonight, we went out to eat. I purposely ordered the vegetable sandwich, the Tartine and convinced myself to like it. Then I reluctantly asked our waitress to hold the side of fries and replace that with a salad, AND I only ate half the sandwich, boxed it to go. This is a lot coming from the girl who used to go here and order her usual truffles and potato ravioli with brown butter. Oh my god, yum. I need to stop talking about this now. This week I even went to "Game Night" at our friends house, a good excuse to drink beer and eat and talk. You know what I drank and ate? NOTHING! Ok, well, a little. I brought a can of sparkling water, so that I would look cool because, you know, I was also drinking from a can like my fellow drinkers. Then there was the bowl of fresh berries that I brought, although everyone grabbed for the brownies, except me. Oh, life is so unfair!

To reward myself I went and bought THESE. Oh yeah baby, super bells. Gap makes good jeans in petites, but you can only find them online. An annoying fact, but it makes for a fun diet reward.

Anyway, I'm just saying, but........tonight, my teeth felt all weird, and then I realized that I forgot to brush them this morning. Just saying.

FIN